[Info-vax] Opportunity for VSI?

[Scott Dorsey]

Simon Clubley  <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>
>In the case of Fortran, how much of the Fortran development is done by
>dedicated programmers, and how much is done by people (say researchers
>and cheap/free labour otherwise known as students) who do the development
>as part of a larger research project ?

Many years ago, we had fortran programmers who would sit down with an
engineer and the two of them would work together to produce code.  

But now in the New Age, engineers all write their own code.  So yes,
although we have a couple dedicated programmers, we have only a couple
of them compared with a couple thousand engineers writing fortran and
matlab.  And those couple dedicated programmers spend their time fixing
stuff that engineers broke.

My belief is that productivity has gone down as a result, and certainly
code efficiency has gone down, but management does not see this.

>In the case of Fortran especially, the latter type of usage is not going
>to show up on the job boards as "Help! Fortran programmer wanted!".

It might be mentioned in the job description, but then again it might not
be.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."